April 10, 2018

A writer named Kevin Willilamson has been in the news. I’d
never heard of him. The controversy that brought him to my attention concerns a
2014 podcast in which he says that “the law should treat abortion like any
other homicide.” And, “I’m torn on capital punishment generally; but treating
abortion as homicide means what it means.”

His remarks have this troubling distinction: They reflect a
real point-of-view taken to its extreme. If abortion is homicide, then there is
a cold intellectual honesty about suggesting that capital punishment could fit
the crime. This argument has a counterpart at the opposite extreme in opinions
like this one, which suggests that any
judgments about “good” and “bad” abortions are a slippery slope to unwanted
legal limitations.

It’s tempting to sigh with relief that few of us follow our
arguments about abortion – pro- or anti- – to their logical ends. That’s not a conversation we want to
have. If abortion is murder, does that mean that women who abort their babies
should go to jail? If we think that there are circumstances the extremity of
which (say, rape, incest, a threat to the life of the mother) warrant access to
abortion, have we not implicitly opened the door to abortion for the sake of
convenience, right up to term (or even to infanticide, as some have suggested)?
We all know these aren’t easy questions. They are morally fraught, legally
complicated. They call into question our values, the soundness of our reasoning,
and our willingness to stand, uncompromising, on our convictions. This requires
a sort of moral courage that few of us possess. We pick a side, vote
accordingly, and carry on until something or someone stirs the pot – like Kevin
Williamson.

There are people who are committed to active engagement with
this issue even during the quiet times, when there are no Kevin Williamsons in
the headlines, no Supreme Court justices to be nominated, no presidential
candidates on the ballot. I am honored to have been asked by some of them – the
leaders of Democrats for Life America (DFLA) – to speak at their national conference this summer in Denver. I am not a pro-life professional. What I’ve
been asked to address is how we can talk to each other in this contentious
environment in ways that might move the conversation forward. This is something
I know a little bit about.

What I know is that people’s minds aren’t changed in a
climate of antagonism, them and us. I’ve been reading a fascinating
sociological history of the rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark (aptly titled The Rise of Christianity). Stark, a
sociologist with a “hobbyist’s” interest in the early Christian movement, says,
“The basis for successful [conversion] movements is growth through social networks,
through a structure of direct and
intimate interpersonal attachments” (p. 20; emphasis original). This in
1997, before the more recent interest in and study of social networks and
social contagion. “Intimate interpersonal
attachments,” says Stark, are the basis of converting someone from one way
of looking at the world to another. Family ties. Friendship. Love.

This is not to say that we have to agree, or even
agree-to-disagree. What it means is that we need to learn to differentiate
between the content of the argument and the person who’s making it. We have to
consider the humanity of the other. He or she is not my opponent, however much
his or her argument may be anathema to all I hold dear. I have to become open
to the other as a person, equal to me. That is, if I want a chance of
persuading.

Often, that’s not what we want. Instead, what we want is to
feel that we’re right and they’re wrong. We want moral superiority. We want to
claim the victory of our rightness. If we care about the issue we’re defending,
especially if we see it as a moral imperative, like the abolition of abortion,
it can become damned frustrating when they
can’t see the obvious merits, the unassailable truth, of our arguments. Out of our feelings of impotency comes inevitable demonization.
Not only is the other wrong, he’s “crazy,” “sick,” “perverted,” a “stupid
asshole pig,” an “idiot.”

I’m sad to say that the quotes above are from the comments
section of the DFLA Facebook page post about Kevin Williamson. This is the
formula for maintaining the stalemate: Us v. Them.

If we are serious about changing laws, we need first to
change minds and hearts. This requires that we consider the rational
compromises we ourselves make to arrive at conclusions that we can live with. It means giving up a little of
our moral superiority, our pride, our righteous indignation, and consider that even
people whose views are abhorrent to us have reasons for thinking what they
think and saying what they say. Do we have the courage to listen? Or are we
too afraid of seeing the humanity of our so-called enemies?

One of my personal heroes, Father Greg Boyle, says in his
recent book, Barking to the Choir: “Moral
outrage is the opposite of God; it only divides and separates what God wants
for us, which is to be united in kinship. Moral outrage doesn't lead us to
solutions - it keeps us from them.” His approach doesn’t affirm destructive
behavior but sees beneath to the life experience within which context the
behavior makes sense. As it happens, Kevin Williamson was born in Texas in 1972
to a mother who put him up for adoption. A few years later, he could have been
an abortion statistic. Conceived before my parents were married in 1966, the
same is true of me. I’m not reaching for excuses, but for understanding. If we
believe that we are defending a vital truth, one that means the difference
between life and death, will we do what it takes to love our enemies, to
establish “direct and intimate interpersonal attachments” to work toward
genuine conversion – ours, theirs, the world’s?